A Letter From Arizona to America

We, in Arizona, know you’re boycotting us — but you really should come out here and see our beautiful Sonoran desert. It’s just gorgeous! We know you’d love it and maybe you can share what you saw with the rest of the country so they can love it too!

This is on an ‘illegal super-highway’ from Mexico to our fair city of Tucson used by human smugglers:

This area is located in a wash, approximately 1.5 miles long, just south of Tucson, Arizona.

It is estimated over 5,000 discarded backpacks are in this wash. Countless water containers, food wrappers, clothing, feces, including thousands of soiled baby diapers.

A Minuteman stands among hundreds of disgarded bags and clothing at a layup area in the Arizona desert.

In 2006 alone, more than 1.18 million pounds of trash was collected along southern Arizona border, many in the meeting spots where immigrants rest, change clothes and wait to hitch a ride further north with a smuggler.

Arizonia officials have spent approximately $4.4 million over five years to clean up the mess, that continues to build with each crossing. Nearly $1 million was spent for 2007 from a base BLM appropriation.

Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which covers most of the Arizona border, doesn’t have statistics about how many people cross through each year, but on average, agents apprehend 1,500 people a day, with 378,000 undocumented immigrants caught in 2007 alone.

“What we’re beginning to wonder is how extensive is the problem?” McFarlin said. “How many millions of pounds of garbage? How many roads are really damaged? How many miles of illegal trails?” McFarlin’s agency works with local government, student volunteers and civic groups to bag trash in wilderness areas frequented by immigrants. The BLM also disguises smuggling roads by planting new vegetation over the desert tracks carved by smugglers.

“The first thing you notice if you were to drive across some of this land is you see water bottles, lots of water bottles,” McFarlin said. “Where people stop to wait to be picked up — we call them ‘layup’ spots — then you will see more of the clothing, medicine bottles, papers, everything. “We recently cleaned up one location with almost 4,000 backpacks left behind,” she said. “We’ve seen it time and time again, where we go in and clean up these areas and within months they’re just filled again with the same debris.”

Isn’t Arizona just beautiful, America? The trail of trash leading out of the wash leads directly north to Tucson. Some day, the garbage will reach your town.

If these actions had been done in one of our Northwest forests or seashore national parks, there would be an uprising of outraged environmentalists. Strange that when it’s happening on the Arizona-Mexican border, no one cares.

You won’t see these pictures on CNN, CBS, ABC, or NBC. Nor will they mention the disease that comes from the uncovered human waste left in our desert. But the networks do offer us unending coverage of cheating celebrities, American Idol, and Dancing With the Stars. They do have their priorities, you know!

One last thing:

An Associated Press reportyesterday, May 19, 2010, says that the latest figures show that Arizona is the only border state where illegal crossings are on the rise.

New U.S. Border Patrol statistics show arrests on the Arizona border were up 6% — by about 10,000 — from October to April. The agency uses arrests to gauge the flow of migrants; there are no precise figures on the number of illegal crossings. Statistics from the Mexican side also show a rise in illegal crossings through Arizona.

If your city or town is inundated with trash left by illegal “immigrants” like ours are, how would you feel?

So, why are you boycotting us for passing a law that enables Arizona to protect ourselves — with no help from the federal government — against this onslaught? Are we no longer the UNITED States of America?

Sincerely,

The legal citizens of Arizona

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H/t beloved Fellowship members FS, Tina, and May whose e-mails contributed to my drafting of this letter!

It is impossible to demonize the law in Arizona by the feds because the law in Arizona dovetails and quotes federal immigration law and there are provisions within the Arizona law the precludes, specifically sets out, no racial profiling. There must be sufficient and good cause to stop someone. This is ludicrous! And, not just the garbage and absolute disregard for the environment, but the immense criminal activity and complications incident thereto that have been brought into Arizona by illegal aliens they understandably will no longer tolerate!